Solidarity from two metres away

A Sri Lankan editor has started an online journal to collate stories about life during the lockdown

A Sri Lankan soldier spraying disinfectant at a railway station in Colombo earlier this month.

“How did you Kashmiris survive the lockdown for six months?” Almost everyone who met or called Nurat Maqbool after the ‘Janata Curfew’ last Sunday asked her, according to an account she wrote in the ‘Lockdown Journal’, an online platform launched by a Colombo-based editor-writer to record stories of the lockdown worldwide in the time of the COVID-19 crisis.

Kashmiris have seen lockdowns “every other week for the last three decades”. But this one, which she experienced in Bengaluru, was not the same. “The lockdown was there [in Kashmir] but it was for a small area and the rest of the world was happy and thriving. Sometimes all of that gives you hope that things will be better for you as well. But in the lockdown of the world, there is no escape,” she wrote on March 22 in the journal.

The journal [lockdownjournal.com], launched by Sunila Galappatti, went live on March 20, and has over 30 entries so far, including from the U.K., India, Jamaica, Nigeria, Portugal, Germany, Sri Lanka and Australia.

The entries are typically short, first person narratives of a full day. While COVID-19 is the running theme, the stories are both similar and different, depending on who and where the writers are.

Eloghosa Osunde, in Abuja, Nigeria, writes about downloading an app used for group video chats. “It is F’s birthday today,” she wrote on March 25, apparently about a friend in Lagos. They chat about assorted things — like earrings and live concerts. They laugh and Ms. Osunde sleeps well that afternoon. She wakes up, works on a playlist and goes about with tasks she’d assigned herself. She realises: “Everything is uncertain, everywhere. But where I am, there’s a more specific terror... it’s the poverty capital of the world, which means that what works for most of the world won’t work for us.”

Together in crisis

On what triggered the journal that curates accounts of a day in the life of someone, somewhere, Ms. Galappatti says: “We are actually in all moments together as a world, but our connection to someone far away is less visible, less palpable. It struck me here was a moment where we were very consciously all in the same crisis together.”

She added: “At the same time, I find it very dispiriting that it is the nation state that we are falling back on — because it is the infrastructure we have. So we are closing our borders, we are counting within countries. I wanted some way for us to reach across that (safely).”

The journal, describing itself as ‘Solidarity from at least two metres away’, is an attempt to try and make sense of this together, to have people share their experiences across contexts, and hopefully discover how people are experiencing it elsewhere. The exercise is open-ended at the moment, with no specific plan for the content that might accumulate, or a visible deadline. Also, Ms. Galappatti is aware that the journal is necessarily written by those least under pressure in this crisis. Those who have “the shelter, sustenance, and the mind-space”.

Another reason drives her effort. “We are still living a little breathlessly, because that is what we know how to do. We are still online, offering expertise and one-upmanship in virtue. Yet, we are in a situation that we haven’t actually been in before. I thought, what about a quiet, gentle place where we tell stories of ourselves that we may not understand till much later.”

Most entries are everyday stories, simply told as they happened to someone. Reading them, you get a now-familiar sense of the general feeling world over, but also a rarer glimpse of the specific.

BBC news journalists, like their counterparts elsewhere, are “essential workers”. That is why Charles Haviland left for work on March 24 in London. He took the Tube — less crowded than usual but not empty enough for comfort — and reached the New Broadcasting House. The few who turned up were sitting, separated by empty desks. A colleague distributed oranges, another offered cartons of skimmed milk that he got from a café upstairs, just before it shut down.

After what has now become a ‘usual news day’— of death tolls and soaring cases — Mr. Haviland was ready to leave. “It is night when I head for home. By Warren Street station, six or seven people, probably homeless, are gathered much too close together. But what comfort can they find apart from each other? They are talking not in English but in... which eastern European language? I can’t get close enough to tell,” he wrote about his day.

(Meera Srinivasan is The Hindu’s Colombo correspondent)